Trying to reach an MP Friday and wondering whether they were ducking you?

They may not have even gotten the message.

MPs and House of Commons staff found themselves cut off from the electronic world Friday after a mysterious outage took down e-mail, blackberry service and the Parliamentary website. While some e-mail access was restored partway through the day, by late afternoon visitors to the Parliamentary website were greeted by a message saying there was an internal server error or by a message saying the service was unavailable.

Officials in the Speakers office said they were “not at liberty to disclose” what caused the problem. They referred calls to the House of Commons IT service desk which responded all day with a recorded message saying they were “currently experiencing problems with access to the network.”

Was it a malicious attack, virus or attempt to hack Parliament’s computer system? Did something break down? Did someone forget to feed the gerbils powering it?